Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

It’s time to admit quantum theory has reached a dead end

nautil.us

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 236 posts

Re: It’s time to admit quantum theory has reached a dead end

#21

Post by mhh__ »

jleyank wrote: post #17
mhh__ wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The things that Schrodinger tried are still valid physics, just for different systems. He didn't know that, but now we do, this has little bearing on modern physics. Also chemists have the luxury of agreeing because the fundamentals of their work (not the day to day act of doing chemistry) gets to assume the presence of physics i.e. it's stampkeeping (depending on who you ask).

Not quite stamp collecting, although botany or anatomy head in that direction. Call chemistry “just applied physics” as engineering is “just applied science”.

I prefer to call engineering "physics ruined by philistines" (sometimes at least, engineers seem to have a unique ability to take beautiful physics and notate it in the most cumbersome "safe" way possible)

Re: It’s time to admit quantum theory has reached a dead end

#22

Post by dekhn »

jleyank wrote: post #17
mhh__ wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The things that Schrodinger tried are still valid physics, just for different systems. He didn't know that, but now we do, this has little bearing on modern physics. Also chemists have the luxury of agreeing because the fundamentals of their work (not the day to day act of doing chemistry) gets to assume the presence of physics i.e. it's stampkeeping (depending on who you ask).

Not quite stamp collecting, although botany or anatomy head in that direction. Call chemistry “just applied physics” as engineering is “just applied science”.

It's a quote ascribed to Rutherford ("all science is physics or just stamp collecting"). I also heard it when studying protein structures in the 90s (the idea being, if you're just a crystallographer cranking out more structures, you're doing stamp collecting; the real reason to determine structures is to elucidate the general principles of protein folding and function).

Note that protein structure prediction finally fell to machine learning and it was "mostly stamp collecting" (IE, the accurate predictions come from subtle analysis of rich protein sequence alignments, not from understanding the fundamental principles of protein folding).

Re: It’s time to admit quantum theory has reached a dead end

#23

Post by not1ofU »

wpietri wrote: post #9
tus666 wrote: post #3

Yes, but go back to philosophy not math. All the evidence suggests the "particle" interpretation of QM is simply wrong, that light or energy really is just a self propagating wave, which explains the double slit experiment cleanly, and is not incompatible with energy levels or quantization if formulated correctly. Experiments that claim to show light consists of particles need to be reassessed wearing a philosopher's…

Could you point to some articles on this? It's way outside of my field, but it sounds very interesting.

This is cool IMO (2016):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRSBaq3vAeY

Apologies if its considered off topic - I see double slit experiment and I always think of this. It blew my mind.

Re: It’s time to admit quantum theory has reached a dead end

#24

Post by renox »

tus666 wrote: post #3

Yes, but go back to philosophy not math. All the evidence suggests the "particle" interpretation of QM is simply wrong, that light or energy really is just a self propagating wave, which explains the double slit experiment cleanly, and is not incompatible with energy levels or quantization if formulated correctly. Experiments that claim to show light consists of particles need to be reassessed wearing a philosopher's…

Yes, I never understood why light was considered 'particles' :-(

As far as I understand it is because light can only be emitted by atoms with discrete energy levels, but (IMHO again) light is emitted by atoms with discrete energy levels because it is emitted when electrons jumps from one energy level to another and that the possible trajectory of electrons around the atoms aren't continuous, I don't see how this is related to the nature of light..

I think that with an [undulator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undulator) you can tune "continuously" the energy of the light emitted: in the webpage it is written "the emitted radiation is coherent with a wavelength determined by the period length and the beam energy", but as the precise relationship between the beam energy and the wavelength produced isn't specified I'm not 100% sure..

Re: It’s time to admit quantum theory has reached a dead end

#25

Post by beaconstudios »

geijoenr wrote: post #5

For some time already we are in an "epicyclean phase" of physics, trapped by the extraordinary predictive success of Quantum Electrodynamics and still using mathematical methods devised in the 19th century (variational calculus). This has lead us to the current situation, with extremely complicated theories at the limit of human understanding that bear no new results. It will take a modern day Copernicus to come up w…

Are more modern information-theoretic and dynamical models not used for quantum mechanics? They're both relatively recent and extremely innovative mathematical models.

Granted, I'm not mathematically fluent enough to know if they represent a deviation from variational calculus!

Re: It’s time to admit quantum theory has reached a dead end

#26

Post by tus666 »

blueprint wrote: post #18
tus666 wrote: post #3

Yes, but go back to philosophy not math. All the evidence suggests the "particle" interpretation of QM is simply wrong, that light or energy really is just a self propagating wave, which explains the double slit experiment cleanly, and is not incompatible with energy levels or quantization if formulated correctly. Experiments that claim to show light consists of particles need to be reassessed wearing a philosopher's…

aiui, professional physicists don't think particles are "real" but a phenomenon that appears as a result of attempting to localize a wavefunction through a measurement

Professional physicists are so lost in the mathematics of wave functions they have lost touch with reality.

Re: It’s time to admit quantum theory has reached a dead end

#28

Post by 8bitsrule »

Even on the macro level there are lots of tricky questions.

A bar magnet is surrounded by magnetic flux lines. Apparently it takes no energy to maintain that magnetic field.

If I heat the bar in boiling water for long enough, it becomes demagnetized. On the macro level there's no visible/measureable change in the bar. We need a lot of magnification to see that the 'particles are no longer aligned'.

On the other hand, I move the bar magnet over a pile of iron filings, some of the filings will fly up against gravity to the bar, against the force of gravity. It takes energy to lift these filings. Where does that energy come from? (It never seems to be exhausted.)

Re: It’s time to admit quantum theory has reached a dead end

#29

Post by tus666 »

mhh__ wrote: post #14
wpietri wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you point to some articles on this? It's way outside of my field, but it sounds very interesting.

The person you are replying to is either wrong or has stated it very badly. The idea of their being both a wave and particle based description of photons that don't mix well is basically physics as known in the 1920s. The modern theoretical framework of light is quantum field theory (special relativity + quantum mechanics, but actually not quite that for [insert qft textbook] reasons...), which doesn't fit into eithe…

We need to go back to the 1920s and start again. As the article explains, modern QM has hit a dead end, and it's little more than mathematical games that have not helped us understand reality.

Re: It’s time to admit quantum theory has reached a dead end

#30

Post by blueprint »

tus666 wrote: post #26
blueprint wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

aiui, professional physicists don't think particles are "real" but a phenomenon that appears as a result of attempting to localize a wavefunction through a measurement

Professional physicists are so lost in the mathematics of wave functions they have lost touch with reality.

what is the reality then? when you get down to those scales, there really does seem to be uncertainty when you try to localize parameters. on one hand it's troubling but it's also lovely because we get stuff like the casimir effect, and who knows what other futuristic technology we might end up making, which we all want
Post reply on HN